Woman finds mouse in Walmart spinach

Rumiko Bosa-Edwards always washes her vegetables.

Her grandmother taught her this habit: “You wash everything,” she said. “She’s instilled that in me.”

When cooking dinner for her family on Friday, Bosa-Edwards, now a grandmother herself, said she realized how crucial washing your vegetables really is.

According to her account, as she rinsed the spinach she had just bought from her local Walmart, she discovered, to her horror, a dead mouse among the greens.

“The eyes were red,” the Las Vegas resident recalled.

As Bosa-Edwards tells it, when she first glimpsed the rodent, she mistook the dark mass hidden in the spinach for a piece of dirt.

She had emptied the container of spinach, which she said was totally sealed when she bought it, into a strainer over her sink.

She pushed the “dirt” to the side with a spatula. When it fell off the strainer into her sink, she recalled exclaiming, “What the hell is that?”

Bosa-Edwards, 65, said she shops at Walmart all the time. She picked up her container of organic Marketside spinach from the store at 6570 E. Lake Mead Blvd. just hours before starting to cook dinner.

Marketside is a private label food brand owned by Walmart. The product is certified organic by the California Certified Organic Farmers, according to a label on the back of the spinach container.

“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority, and we are working with our supplier to investigate this alleged incident,” a Walmart spokesperson said.

Dominique Bosa-Edwards, Rumiko’s daughter, had been in the kitchen with her mom when she was prepping other ingredients for a soup she was making.

Her mom had been chopping up carrots and onions, she said, washing them in the same sink where the mouse would later be found.

Dominque Bosa-Edwards took her niece to a pool down the road, but when she received a phone call from her mom, rushed back to the house.

“She was hysterical,” she said, and recalled her mom breathing heavily over the phone. When Dominique Bosa-Edwards arrived back at the house, she saw the dead rodent surrounded by spinach in the sink.

Rumiko Bosa-Edwards recalled her granddaughter telling her, “Gramma! I see its tooth!”

After “trying not to have panic attacks,” she said she called Walmart around 30 minutes after finding the mouse.

“They never answered,” she said. “I called them like six times.”

At around 9 p.m., she decided to take matters, and the mouse, into her own hands.

After having her husband place the rodent into a trash bag along with the spinach, Bosa-Edwards returned to Walmart. “What am I going to do, put it in my fridge?” she said.

When she arrived, she recalled an employee telling her that the customer service desk had already closed. “You don’t understand,” Bosa-Edwards said she told the employee. “I have a mouse in my spinach.”

She was promptly rushed through to an employee who saw the mouse and the spinach in the bag. One employee said “there’s a tail,” Bosa-Edwards remembers.

The staff at the Walmart neighborhood market apologized and gave Bosa-Edwards a refund, she said.

Now, she’s considering legal action. She’s not sure what happened to the mouse, but said she feels that she maybe should have kept it to get it tested.

“I just hope it’s not diseased. I’m sure that mouse has been over a lot of spinach,” she said. “That’s my number one concern.”

Bosa-Edwards has since returned to Walmart to see whether the same spinach packets line the shelves — and she said they do.

“Under the words baby spinach it says ‘WASHED &READY TO EAT,’ which left me with a bad taste in my mouth,” she said of the spinach’s packaging.

When she returned the mouse to Walmart, Bosa-Edwards said no one took her contact information, and she has not been contacted since.

“I just want people to know,” she said.

Bosa-Edwards said the experience was so disgusting that she disinfected her sink three times.

“Now I’m thinking, oh man, can I have a new sink?” she said.

Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com or 610-810-8450.